


the only star that guided me was you

by Marenke



Series: sea of bitterness [7]
Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Flashbacks, Historical References, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Muteness, NaNoWriMo, Past, Past Lives, Reincarnation, Somewhat., but like selective, mikhaela is asian but it's not like explicitely reference just letting yall know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-23
Updated: 2019-11-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:27:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21528313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marenke/pseuds/Marenke
Summary: What’s the worst kind of death? Mary couldn’t say for sure.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Series: sea of bitterness [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1534817
Kudos: 10





	the only star that guided me was you

**Author's Note:**

> WHEW LADS welcome to the last part of.......... this series, whatever it is. i wrote myself into a small knot w making an anastasia (broadway/1997) crossover BUT thats ok thats cool cool really i just wrote my way around it. anyway i hope yall enjoy mikhaela and (the last) mary!

What’s the worst kind of death? Mary couldn’t say for sure. Was it asphyxiation (two counts: one through the ashes from the fire coating her lungs, the other one disease closing her throat)? Was it drowning (two counts: one by salt water and other by fresh water)? Was it suicide (three counts, her highest: one by swinging on a rope, another by drowning, and the third one by freezing to death on purpose). 

It was hard to decide which will be her undoing this life.

* * *

“Mommy.” Mary started, slow and not like a child, holding the childhood book on Jeanne d’Arc to her tired mother to see. The little girl - no more than six, ginger hair unruly on her head, more of a mop than hair, a shapeless birthmark on her face hastily hidden by a bandage - stopped, respectful: perhaps a little too much.

“Yes?”

“Where am I?” She asked, showing the open pages of the book, simple drawings showing a young, blonde girl seeing saints. “Where am I in history?”

Mary had never spoken like a child; she had never been one. Her mother smiled, tired of questions, of trying to understand this child, too smart for her own good, too old, too weird.

“You’re here. In the present.” Her mother answered, eyes back to her crossword.

“No, not here. In history. I remember Jeanne. She was my friend, but I’m - I’m not in any books. Did Jeanne forget me?”

There was a sadness, a melancholy to her voice which went ignored. 

“How could she forget you, if she never knew you?”

* * *

Ever since she could remember, Mary had known all of her past lives. From Marie to Mimi to Masha, they all had haunted her, all her deaths and experiences from as early as she could remember haunted her being.

It made her a strange child, a not-quite adult in a child’s body, black eyes too big and kind while her voice spoke in  _ frenchenglishrussianitalianportuguese,  _ like a mixed bag where not every word was in the same language as the one before. It made for a complicated few years, toddling around asking questions in so many languages it was a headache to keep up. It did not help that not all languages were modern, English from the sixteenth century in her tongue as she wrote in a drawing letters from pre-1917 Russian. Her mother dragged her and her drawings from linguist to linguist, an academic mystery. How could a child know so much? How could a brain hold that much information and not go into a mental breakdown? How did she understand herself?

When she got older she learned to control it, learned to speak in one language when spoken to. Mary learned to stay quiet, to not ask questions about the girls her memories revolved around, to not  _ be _ ; when people learned she could recall previous lives with pinpoint perfection, a movie with no blurriness, she was either seen as a child with an overactive imagination or a child prodigy. There weren’t any in-between, her pendulum always in one side or another. 

Needles had touched her brain one too many times, trying to figure out what part of herself allowed these memories to be called back from the confines of the - soul? There was a discussion about this. Mary did not care.

* * *

Mary was sent to professor Steven’s care at age thirteen, when her mother finally tired herself of living with a scientifical, theological and academic mystery, as if Mary was some sort of easily thrown away toy. 

She knew it was because Mary wasn’t the daughter she wanted to have: her mother wanted a nice child, who smiled and played around, not a brooding little thing with a terrible birthmark that more resembled a bruise and had enough death in her veins to feed an army of reapers. She did not mind: her head had memories of enough mothers to sustain her. It didn’t mean it didn’t sting.

Besides, her mother this life wasn’t any shade of discreet, not when she had a child over a hundred years old: Mary had seen the signs of her creating a new life for herself long before her mother did. She saw the perfume bottles, brand new, and the makeup, littering the bathroom counter. 

He introduced his daughter, Mikhaela, to Mary the first day she stayed over. There were electrodes in Mary’s head, monitoring brain waves for God knew what purpose, and Mikhaela was small, frail, a mop of badly cut black hair in her head framing angular eyes that were more soulless than anything Mary had seen outside of a mirror, whenever she caught a glimpse of herself. 

(mirrors were a funhouse to her: when one had so many bodies and knew that, knowing and recognizing yourself was tricky. Some days she swore she was still Masha, that malnourished little thing with calloused hands from sewing; other days were more like she was still Manon, spoiled, naïve and insane, seeking a thrill that had long been snuffed out)

“Mikhaela is not my daughter,  _ exactly _ .” The professor said, with such a sense of pride it was disturbing. Mikhaela did not react to this declaration. “While you seem to keep all your memories of your past lives and current, Mikhaela here has one day appeared with no sort of memories. Researching government databases showed nothing; it’s almost as if she had spawned on the airport. No name, no dental records, no fingerprint matches in any place of the world: while you are a living memory, Mikhaela is a living amnesia.”

Mikhaela did not sketch any sort of emotion in her face at this, and a protective hand of the professor went to the girl’s shoulder. She did not flinch, did not look up: a vessel, perfect and immutable.

“I hope you two will get along. The girl with memories and the girl with none.” He chuckled at this, as if it was a joke; Mary did not see the fun part of it.

* * *

Mikhaela did not speak, at all: she knew sign language in English and knew how to write, but she simply did not, preferring to stare and stay in place instead of taking action, like a puppet whose strings had been cut, but had never been told to stop moving.

Mary looked at her, blinked once, and decided that it was okay. She could understand her point of view. Were she the same, she’d react identically.

The professor suggested they studied, and Mary used his extensive book collection to find the fate of her past lovers. Mikhaela helped, if only in virtue of staying and listening to Mary speak about long dead women. It was nice to have company: her mother never cared much about memories of people long gone.

Jeanne was impossible to find: after all, every source said she was dead, had seen her burn at the stake, but how would one explain that no, Jeanne hadn’t, it had been her childhood friend whose name had been scratched away from the books? Historians scratched their heads at Mary and her claims.

Kathryn, she did not need to: she had seen her head separate from her neck, had felt the warmth of the blood on her face. To wash it off, she had drowned, water in her face and in her lungs until it burned like fire.

For Anne, only the transcript of her trial survived, and so did the transcript of her tortures; to read them and know what they did to the sweet girl she had known (sweet? Could Anne be described as sweet without a hint of irony in it?) had almost made her slip into Manon’s skin, made her want to poison the professor and swung in rope again. Fists curled against paper, Manon’s mind racing in French as she felt the taste of poison coat her mouth, planning,  _ planning, where was the rope, where  _ -

Mikhaela touched her hand and looked at her, empty, a vessel without a name, warm and comforting: a ghost of a presence to ground her back in reality. Mary looked back, and nodded, setting aside Anne’s life as she went for the next one of her lovers.

Aimée was a complicated case. She remembered her being taken by pirates, and some sources said she had become a concubine of Abdul Hamid, but there was a confusion with places, forgery and dates that did not match. Mimi  _ wanted  _ for Aimée to have survived, but Mary - distant enough, but still attached - wondered if death wouldn’t have been kinder. To be forcefully married to a man she did not know, did not like, forced to bear his children and to raise his son, or to die a quiet death at the sea, together with her, their bones resting together at the bottom of the ocean.

“What do you think?” She asked Mikhaela, after a lengthy philosophical explanation on the idea, and the girl, who was reading over her shoulder, the two lying down on the comfortable red carpet of the expansive personal library. Mikhaela shrugged, and her eyes devoid of life went back to the book about Aimée. 

Mary sighed and nodded; Mikhaela was right, it didn’t matter: whatever answer they came up with, it wouldn’t change the fact that  _ her  _ bones laid down in the middle of the ocean, while Aimée’s bones rested on a tomb that didn’t even have her own name. Even in death, separated - was there any fate crueler?

After Aimée came Stephanie, sweet and dead before her time. All Mary had were nine days worth of memories, barely enough to know the woman, her life. All she had known was the sick girl in her bed, whose husband spent nary a thought on her, while Maria took care of her. There wasn’t much on her, either on Mary’s past life or in the books, but she made a note of the hospitals created to her, for her, by her, and smiled. 

Then, Anastasia, whose body had never been found, Anastasia who whisked her away and gave her a little life. Anastasia, who died brutally, murdered without a second thought. Maybe Masha had been right to choose to not live in a world that did not know what had happened to her Anya.

“The bones never were found, huh… I mean, they found Alexei’s, and no one knows if the body with him was Anya or Maria, but…” Mary said to Mikhaela, and Mikhaela looked at her. “Does it matter? Either way, she’s dead. The missing body is interesting, though...”

What had happened of her Anya? Maybe Masha should’ve ran away; maybe she could’ve helped her.

Too late now, though: a hundred years between her last death and the present day had passed, and Masha was still Mary.

She would always be  _ a _ Mary, not  _ the  _ Mary.

* * *

By age eighteen, five years away from her research on her past and with many long afternoons spent lazily with Mikhaela, she was already tired of the world, counting down the clock to her death, trying to hurry it up; it wasn’t like she ever went beyond age twenty, anyway. Death longed to claim her soul, to mark her and take her from life, gasping and alone.

What worried her, too, was that she hadn’t met her soulmate (always the same girl: it was the eyes, the essence hidden within, always different but so recognizable) yet. Where was Jeanne? Where was her darling Anne? Where was Aimée, Anastasia, Stephanie, Kathryn? The question bit at her edges, waiting for an answer that she couldn’t give with only books.

Sneaking down the window, a cigarette in her lips barely holding a candle to the whipping winds as she went down the professor’s three stories home, she looked up, where Mikhaela followed her, diligent and quiet. She had been gaining emotions, lately - when the first of her expeditions started, Mikhaela hadn’t come, but now her presence was like a comforting blanket over her shoulders: safety on the dark streets.

“You don’t have to come with me, you know?” She told Mikhaela, who simply adjusted her leather jacket better against her body. Her hair was still a mop that she cut herself, and her eyes were still soulless, but Mikhaela was always Mary’s constant companion. “I mean, let the professor be angry at  _ me _ . Imagine what he’d say if his precious daughter got corrupted by such a bad influence as myself?”

Mikhaela smiled, sardonic, and Mary laughed at her, offering a hand for Mikhaela to hold as they walked down the street. The streetlights sparkled over them, bathing the world in a yellow color that reminded Mary of the view from the pyre, but she didn’t care. Marie was a sheen of ashes in the Seine, and Mary would soon follow the deathly path she had set upon all of them.

What death waited for her this time? Would it be fire, or maybe water? A plague, an accident, asphyxiation: the possibilities were endless.

Mikhaela’s grip on her hand became tighter, as if she could read her mind, and Mary grinned at her.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere without you.” She told Mikhaela, and maybe, maybe if she was a normal girl, no memories of past lives and past loves to haunt her every waking second, she could’ve loved her. But it wouldn’t be fair, would it, to doom Mikhaela to an early grave? So if Mary bore any feelings for the girl with a mop of hair on her head, they were smothered down before any chance to be felt became real. 

If Mary was to die anyway, it would be best to end this cycle with no one else. Just her and her own death.

“Y’know,” She started, slowly, and Mikhaela’s eyes snapped to her. “, I don’t get why you’re attached to me, or why you like me, but I’m happy it’s you.”

Mikhaela smiled, the first genuine smile with any sort of emotion whatsoever in the long time Mary had known her, and her hand grasped, tighter,  _ tighter _ , against Mary’s own.

* * *

“I used to live here.” She told Mikhaela, snowflakes falling around them as they looked, from the other side of the street, into the apartment - tiny and cramped - she lived once with her mother.

She could see the shadow of the woman who birthed there walking from one side to another, a shadow of a child - no older than six - following her. From the distance, the world was blurry, and the tears that froze in her eyelashes weren’t to blame this time.

Mikhaela looked at her, eyes curious, head inclined to the building.

“I’m glad she made a life without me. I’m trouble, aren’t I?”

Headshake, tighter fingers against her own.

“Don’t lie. I know that no single mom wants a child who is older than herself. A demanding child, one that wants answers to questions no one but the dead know.” A laugh, dry as hay, as she saw the shadow of a man wrap an arm around her mother’s ghostly figure. “She seems happy. Is this the life she wanted, I wonder? A man and a child that isn’t troublesome.”

Mikhaela’s hand on her own was the only warm thing in that street as they turned back to the professor’s home, Mikhaela leading the way back, steps angry on the snow. 

She had seen enough for six lifetimes.

* * *

The professor was putting electrodes in her head again, readying Mary for yet another investigation session. He  _ still  _ couldn’t pinpoint which part of her brain stored those memories - only the memory cortex activated when she talked about it, which made sense, right? They were memories, after all -, but it seemed that he had been making strides on it. Somehow. He didn’t get in her and Mikhaela’s way, and just asked for her to answer questions, to allow some light needle probing in her brain every once in a while. She could pay that rent; it was better than having to use the money her mother had been paid to get rid of her troublesome child.

“You’ve been going out with Mikhaela, haven’t you?” He asked, and Mary nodded. “Has she spoken?”

“Has she ever? What makes you think she’d speak to me?” Mary replied, and the professor sighed, finishing his job and lightly zapping her brain. Yelping, she would’ve made a motion to rip off the electrodes, but Mary realized why he had strapped down her arms and legs to the chair she was sitting on. “Hey!”

“Mikhaela is another important experiment. Don’t corrupt her, Mary.” He gently admonished, and Mary scoffed. Not  _ daughter _ , not  _ ward _ : experiment, like a bacterial culture or a white rat with big, red eyes, stuck in a cage with no option to run away. 

Mikhaela was neither. She waited until he was close, adjusting an electrode, and then stepped on his feet with as much strength as she could muster. The black, leather Doc Martens probably helped his loud yelp, a string of curses leaving his lips and being registered by the recorder. That’d be nice to explain, later, when he’d show around the recordings to his colleagues. 

“Mikhaela isn’t an experiment, professor.” Mary spat, and he glared at her for a brief moment, before regaining that professorial, placid look. “Get that through your thick skull.”

“Of course. My mistake. Let us begin.” He said, and the electricity started, making her teeth chitter.

* * *

Marie watched the pyre’s fires as they lapped at her feet; Jeanne in the crowd looked on, despair shining in her eyes. 

Blink and you’ll miss her there, gaunt and frail and powerless, not the girl who defeated the English, simply a girl with too-short hair and too-hollow cheeks and empty eyes. Did her soul die with Marie on the pyre?

_ What do you see? _ The voice of a God she never really believed in voice asked, distant, a faraway echo of the centuries to come. Marie looks at the God above and smiles at Him.

_ I see a country riddled by its own ignorance _ .

The wind fanned the flames, rising tall and obscuring her view.

* * *

Marion at the edge of the Thames: staring at her reflection in the dark, murky waters. The smell choked her throat like a hand, and if anyone saw her there, they did not indicate stopping her next few acts.

_ What do you see? _ Asks her reflection, with eyes that aren’t her own. Marion touched the blood on her cheek, smudging and staining the whites of her dress, tinting it pink, but she still can feel the warm and cooling blood on her skin, congealing into a thick paste.

Not too long ago, the body this blood belonged to had been warm underneath her tongue, her fingers, her body. Now...

_ I see the blood of an innocent woman. _

A sigh from her reflection. Marion fell into the murky depths.

* * *

Manon was creeping to Anne’s cell, cape covering her body and hugging her in warmth against the worst of the winter, the dungeon cold and unfathomable. Women jeer at her, and the ones who don’t have had their tongues cut or plain don’t see her, eyeballs hanging from their faces.

Anne waited for her in her cell, sitting prim and proper as if this were her house. Her throat looked sore, raw, and an empty bucket resting outside was the only remnant of torture, red hair having fallen into clumps onto the ground. What had they done to her poor Anne?

_ What do you see? _ Asked Anne, voice a rasp of what had been, when Manon’s fingers curled against the thick iron bars, close and yet so far, and Manon bit her lower lip, tears filling her eyes and threatening to spill.

_ I see my heart, freely given to another. _

Anne’s face contorted into a painful expression, pain and love intermingled with false rage as she rose up, wobbly, from her seat.

* * *

Mimi, on the library with Aimée. The bible was between them, long forgotten: the two were enjoying the miser rays of sun that came through the vitrals, bathing their world in red, red as blood, fresh as life.

Aimée was snoring softly, head laid down in the table, resting in her arms, and sleep threatened to overcome Mimi as well. Yawning, she spared a glance at the bible they used to learn French, the language foreign to the two, sounding out the words until they made no sense anymore.

_ What do you see?  _ The psalm asked, and Mimi closed the holy book as she rolled her shoulders, rising from her seat to shake Aimée awake before any nun caught her sleeping.

_ I see my best friend _ . There was no reason to answer the bible, but something inside her compelled Mimi to do so anyway.

Aimée’s eyes snapped open, and she smiled softly, no shadows hindering her face, no fear marring her expression.

* * *

Maria gently cleaned Stephanie’s face as the woman watched, dark eyes tracking the slow movements she did. The smell of the rose water was pungent between them, nauseating and masking the scent of rot that came from Stephanie’s throat.

The door opened, and a quick glance at the clock told her it was time for the queen’s breakfast with the king. She finished her job as quickly as possible, bowing as she rose, the wet rag filthy with sweat crumpled in her fist, drops falling into the carpet.

_ What do you see?  _ The butler’s voice asked, and Maria’s bowed form did not let her know if this question was directed at her, at the king or at Stephanie.

She answered nonetheless:  _ I see a queen, dead before her time.  _

Then, raising up herself from the bow, she accepted the simple tray with hard bread and coffee, watching as the queen and king chatted happily, like she wouldn’t be dead soon.

* * *

Masha watched as Anastasia wrote on the frozen ground of the palace, Alexei’s screams punctuating the world into a hellscape of ice. Her feet were cold, and her fingers felt close to freezing as she watched Anastasia, empty eyes and empty mind, write on the ground.

“And that’s how you write  _ that _ !” Anastasia said, glowing, smiling even though her brother was screaming until his lungs burst in blossoming blood. “What does this say?”

_ What do you see?  _ was hastily written on the ground, letters splotchy in the way someone with not much practice could write. It was odd; Anastasia ought to have a better writing, as a Grand Duchess. Right?

No, she didn’t. That was the truth: she wasn’t bound by the rules of normal people. Anastasia did not like studying, did not like anything that put her time in things she deemed useless. Writing was an afterthought that she did out of social need, and it showed in the sloppiness of her letters, the wrongness of her angles.

_ I see a girl, too smart for her own good. _ She replied to Anastasia, who puffed her cheeks, but smiled nonetheless.

* * *

Mary floated between memories, space and time meaningless to her. A moment she was in Lyon, burning, and the next she was drowning in the ocean. Watching her lives pass by her was stupid, and she hated the professor’s experiments. 

_ What do you see? _ She asked herself, aloud, and Mikhaela appeared by her side, extending a hand. She had Jeanne’s short hair with Stephanie’s own brain of hair color, Anne’s fox-like eyes, Kathryn’s smile and Aimée’s soft side, and to top it off, Anastasia’s will to live.

_ I see my soul, reflected against my own, a mirror image that's not quite the same. _ She replied, grasping Mikhaela’s hand on her own, fingers interlocking as she brought the spectre closer.  _ I see the person I’ve chased for centuries, always unaware but always crossing paths. _

_ Who do you see? _

A smile: no other person, no past or future, Mikhaela the only thing in Mary’s field of vision, filling her soul and her world and everything that mattered. The ghost of a girl put her hand on Mary’s birthmark, close enough that she’d feel the heat, were any of this real.

_ I see you, Mikhaela. Who else? _

* * *

The professor snapped her out of the experiment with the usual clicker, and undid the electrodes on her head, the restraints the last thing to go, as if she was a feral child with too sharp teeth, always ready to snap at someone’s throat. There was a routine to her undoing, and she was thankful for it.

“Was any information today useful, professor?” Mary asked, smiling coyly, and the professor smiled back, carefully pulling the electrodes so they wouldn’t rip out her hair much.

“Of course! Your brain map…” He then delved into a long-winded explanation on brain matter and neuron pathways and more things that Mary had always pretended to politely hear, but never truly did. When she was free, Mary jumped from her chair, stretched her sore body, and went to her shared room with Mikhaela.

The girl was already waiting for her there, reading boredly a comic they had bought on their last outing. When Mary rapped on the door to announce her entrance, Mikhaela raised her eyes and smiled.

“I’m back.” She said, sliding to sit by Mikhaela’s side, snuggling into her, and Mikhaela leaned back into her.

_ Welcome back,  _ she wrote in her skin, and Mary kissed her exposed wrist softly, which made the other girl giggle as she made a slow trail of kisses upward, to Mikhaela's soft mouth. It was enough, wasn’t it? If they didn’t name what this was, then there would be no death.


End file.
